1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to network management and more specifically to network management using network planning.
2. Description of Related Art
Existing external network planning systems are only aware of the resources that are in a network and are not aware of the physical demands that are seen by the network. A planning system receives a demand forecast and gets the current state of the network, such as available resources. However, the planning system does not know details about the actual recent demands. Therefore, there is no true match between a demand forecast process and actual resources as the actual demands are unknown.
In addition, external planning systems are typically used by marketing personnel within a service provider before the actual network is placed in use. Without the ability to determine the actual use of a network, the demand forecast based on inputs from the marketing personnel may miss fine details regarding use of the network.
There exists a need, therefore, to provide a novel network planning system that uses actual network demands to influence forecasts of network usage.